From Concentrate

The majority of orange juice consumed in England is "from concentrate". This means the fruit was picked, squeezed, and then boiled until the water - which is to say most of what an orange actually is - is driven off. This leaves a syrup at around 65 Brix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brix). Density means it is cheap to store and cheap to ship, exactly the reason for its existence; it can sit in a tank on a dock in Alicante for a year and be routed whenever it is needed to the demand. It is then reconstituted with water from somewhere near you, eventually ending up in a carton labelled with sun-drenched orange trees or smiling cartoon figures.

Our regulations require that the finished product hit a minimum of 11.2 Brix. Remember that number; it is a floor, an absolute bare minimum, not a gauge of what I (and I hope you) would consider "Orange Juice".

Maybe, you are not just ordering an OJ from the cafe, but you're in the market for a bottle for your fridge, to have with a microwaved porridge and instant coffee in the morning. Here, you might get to look through the shelves of your local branch of Tesco and find the "never from concentrate" declarations. This is the part that ought to sting. "Not from concentrate" was a phrase coined by Tropicana in the eighties as a marketing manoeuvre; it distinguishes juice that was never boiled down, but it does not, and never did, mean fresh. That juice is squeezed, pasteurised, and then deaerated — the oxygen is stripped out of it so it will not turn brown — and stored in aseptic tanks, million-gallon tanks, for up to a year. The problem is that when you take the oxygen out, you also take out the volatile aromatic compounds, which is to say you take out everything that makes an orange taste like an orange. What is left in the tank, by all accounts, is a flat, sweet, faintly sour liquid that tastes of very little.

[as a short aside, a recent James Hoffman video "The Truly Absurd Secrets of An Incredible Americano" investigating aerated americano drinks is an excellent demonstration of why these volatile aromatics are needed for the delicious-ness we crave]

So they put the flavour back in. Not with oranges but with a "flavour pack", a proprietary blend engineered from orange peel oils and essence, formulated for the juice companies by the same flavour-and-fragrance houses that formulate perfumes. Ethyl butyrate is the big one; it is the molecule your nose reads as "freshly squeezed". The flavour packs are tuned by region, because the Americans want it sweeter and the Europeans want it sharper, and they do not appear on the ingredients list, because they are technically derived from orange, and so the carton can say, with a straight face, one hundred per cent pure orange juice, not from concentrate, no added anything.

Picked, squeezed, pasteurised, deaerated, tanked for a year, stripped of its soul, re-perfumed by the people who make Dior, and poured into a glass in front of you.

That is the process. And here is the thing that disturbs me; every glass tastes the same. That is not a coincidence, it is the entire objective. An orange is a fruit, from a tree, with a season; a January orange and a July orange are different objects. The fact that the carton in your fridge tastes identical in January and July, this year and last year, is not a triumph of food engineering. It is proof that the fruit has been engineered out of it. Consistency is what you build when you have given up on quality, because consistency is cheaper to manufacture and easier to sell, and because nobody ever got sacked for delivering exactly what was delivered last quarter.

Now go to Spain, and look for some refreshments; any old hole in the wall. Ask for an Orange Juice with your espresso. The man behind the counter will take three or four oranges, feed them into the squeezer that lives on the bar, next to the till, in full view. Moments later he will hand you a glass, and it will cost you two euros, and it will be one of the best things you drink all year. This is what the Spanish drink every morning - it is not a delicacy.

He is not an artisan. Nobody is going to write about him. He is a bloke in a bar, taking pride in his job, on an ordinary Tuesday, providing refreshments to a standard that in England we would consider a luxury.

That is the point, and it is the whole point: we appear to have stooped, or perhaps been pushed, to a level that the ordinary is now deluxe. When there is no room to improve, the powers that be have widened the lower bounds to diversify offerings and differentiate the bottom end, not improve the ceiling.

And it is both. We were pushed, and we stooped, and those two facts are not in competition with one another; they are in partnership, and neither one of them would have got the job done alone.

They did not make the juice worse and tell you it was the same. What they did was build a new rung underneath the existing one, and then sell you the existing one back as a luxury. "Not from concentrate" is not a better juice than the juice your grandmother drank; it is the same industrial product it always was, elevated to premium simply by the invention of something worse to stand beneath it. The range did not slide downwards. It stretched downwards. And once you have widened the bottom end you can differentiate within it, and price within it, and advertise within it, and the entire commercial energy of the enterprise. There is more money in inventing new ways to be cheap than in inventing new ways to be good, and that is not going to change by itself.

Because we will not say anything. And this is really my point - as a nation, we have lost the sense of how to

We are a people so frightened of appearing to have notions that we have made not-minding into a personality. We do not send things back. We do not ask what is in it. We are handed a £3.40 glass of reconstituted Brazilian syrup — and it is usually Brazilian, incidentally; the orange in your English breakfast has generally travelled further than you have and been in storage longer than most of your relationships — and we say thank you, and we drink it, and if pressed we will say that it was fine. It's fine. The two most quietly devastating words in the language. Can't complain. Mustn't grumble. We have a national catchphrase that explicitly forbids the objection. We laugh at ourselves before anybody else can get there, which feels like modesty and has curdled, over forty-odd years, into a genuine and settled expectation of mediocrity — and an expectation of mediocrity is a prophecy that fulfils itself, every time, without fail, because standards are not held up by regulators or by boardrooms. They are held up by ordinary people declining, quietly and consistently and slightly awkwardly, to put up with the alternative.

Which brings us back to 11.2.

That number is the only standard we ever bothered to write down. Not a definition of orange juice — a minimum. The least you may legally get away with before the thing you are selling stops being allowed to call itself juice at all. And we have done something quietly disgraceful with it: we have adopted it. We have taken a line drawn to mark the very bottom of the barrel and we have started treating it as though it described the barrel. Legal has come to mean fine. Permitted has come to mean decent. Meets the standard has come to mean is the standard — and it is worth saying plainly, because I am not sure anybody says it plainly enough any more, that this is not okay. It is not okay to build a floor and then live on it. Give a man a minimum and he will hit it precisely, to the decimal place, and never once look up. The French, for what it is worth, wrote down what bread is. We wrote down how little juice we would tolerate before calling the lawyers.

And this is where the juice stops being about juice.

Culture is not the castles and The Archers. Those are the exhibits; those are what we show visitors. Culture is what you eat on a Tuesday, and what you expect on a Tuesday, and what you will not stand for on a Tuesday. It is the accumulated weight of a million tiny refusals, and it is not held in museums, it is held in the hands of a bloke in a bar in Valencia at eight in the morning who would be ashamed to hand you something from a carton — not because he is a craftsman, but because you are a person, and he is not going to insult you before nine o'clock.

That is the bit we have lost, and it is the bit that matters. Taking care over what you feed people is not fussiness and it is not luxury and it is certainly not showing off. It is a way of saying that the people you are serving are worth the trouble. It is why the Spaniard squeezes, why the Frenchman legislated for his bread, why in Japan and Korea an ordinary lunch is treated as something worth getting right rather than something to be got through — the pride is not really in the food at all, it is in each other, and the food is simply where you can see it. Which means the reverse is also true, and we ought to sit with it: to hand a stranger a packet sandwich you have warmed up and charged him seven pounds for is to tell him, in a small way, that he is not worth the effort. And to drink the perfume and say nothing is to agree with him.

Graham Greene understood this, and he put it in a stick of seaside rock. Ida, in Brighton Rock, explains the whole of human nature with it: bite it anywhere, bite it right down to the middle, and the word still reads through. It is not a refined object. It is a cheap, gaudy, tooth-cracking thing sold to day-trippers on a wet pier for pennies — and it is honest all the way to the centre, because the word is not printed on it, the word is it. Note where that standard comes from. Not Valencia. Not Paris. A sweet shop on the English coast. We wrote it ourselves, and we have no business pretending that caring about the details is a foreign affectation that we are constitutionally unsuited to.

And now look at the carton in the fridge, which is the exact inversion of that stick of rock: the word printed on the outside and nowhere else; the deeper in you go the less orange you find; and at the dead centre of it, a chemist in a laboratory being paid a great deal of money to manufacture the smell of the very thing the label insists it already is.

We have become a country that prints the word on the wrapper. We used to be a country that ran it all the way through.

So, no — this is not really about orange juice, and it never was. It is about what we are willing to be handed without a word. A nation's image of itself is not built in Westminster or at the Cenotaph or on a Sunday; it is built, or dismantled, at ten thousand counters every morning, in the half-second where a man decides whether to squeeze the orange or open the carton, and in the half-second afterwards where you decide whether to say anything about it.

We could squeeze the orange. Or we can carry on drinking the perfume and telling ourselves it is fruit.